By Joyce Morgan

They cheered, they hissed, they took selfies as they were splattered in fake blood. Ah, those groundlings.

Rollicking and immersive: A Midsummer Night's Dream as it might have played in Shakespeare's time.

This is as rollicking and immersive a production of Shakespeare's most popular comedy as has ever romped across a modern stage.

The play may be set in midsummer, but the audience was wrapped up for the fag-end of winter in this delightful open-air venue, a replica of Shakespeare's 17th-century theatre.

The surprise is how intimate the 900-capacity Pop Up Globe feels. With three tiers of seating and a standing area for the "groundlings" in front of the stage, the circular building means audiences are never far from the action.

This pop-up theatre and the four productions to be staged during the Sydney season originated in New Zealand. And this is evident in a Dream in which the fairies are traditional Maori figures.

Its strength is to highlight how out of place – and out of their depth – are the European lovers, dressed in their Jacobean finery, as they enter this indigenous domain.

Three worlds collide as the harsh Athenian court, the mischievous fairies and the mechanicals – a group of tradies in high-vis vests branded "Sweet Ass Mechanical Solutions" – bump up against each other.

The female leads are played by men, as they were in Shakespeare's day. That choice, together with the lack of set and microphones, give a sense of how 17th-century audiences would have experienced the play. But with contemporary gags, hip-hop and a Romeo and Juliet mash-up, director Miles Gregory has taken this out of the realm of reverential, museum Shakespeare.

Most of the fairies' dialogue is delivered in Maori language. So audiences listening for some of Shakespeare's most memorable lines – Oberon's poetic "I know a bank where the wild thyme grows" or Puck's "What fools these mortals be" – will listen in vain.

Nonetheless, an exasperated Puck's (Jade Daniels) comment on the fickle "Pakeha" lovers brought the house down.

Fairy queen Titania (Asalemo Tofete) was captivating, and her first act scene with her black-clad antler-headed spirits was magical.

Chris Huntly-Turner as bumptious Bottom, transformed into Titania's absurd love-interest with the giant head of an ass, had the audience eating out of his hoary hand.

The second half is more slapstick, as the male lovers Lysander (Will Alexander) and Demetrius (Patrick Carroll) shift affections between Hermia (Max Loban) and Helena (Thomas Wingfield) and the mechanicals deliver their knockabout "tragical comedy".